There is a growing awareness of obesity and the human health problems it causes. In order to address this problem, there seems to be general agreement that a proper diet and a variety of physical activities are needed.
In order to attack this problem at its origin, there is an increasing recognition that the physical activity habits of children are key. Growing children need to develop and utilize their muscles.
We do not exist in a culture that lends itself to physical activity. The modern lifestyle is founded on and depends upon transportation, which has eliminated most physical activities and duties.
Children are not exempt from this new sedentary lifestyle. To take a typical example, a student, after an evening of sedentary T.V., telephone and computer involvement, rises in the morning, either walks or is driven a minimal distance to a bus stop where he then begins another sedentary day. The student may sit on a bus one or more hours per day on his way to and from school. At school, the majority of the student's day will be sedentary, twenty five to thirty hours per week.
Taking the example of a child's leg muscles, routine muscle development and conditioning are critical to the physical development of growing children. The leg flexor muscles that a child naturally develops as an infant, as he struggles to get on his feet and then become stable, then walking and running, through the five or so infancy years until he reaches school age, must continue to develop and progress. The leg flexor muscle development must be allowed to continue when and after a child takes his first steps onto a school bus, as he begins a sedentary lifestyle.
In most households, expensive equipment, like treadmills and stationary bicycles, just sit there; either broke down or used for hanging laundry. This is because one of the most difficult things to do is to exercise for the sake of exercising.
Obesity is not likely to be addressed by voluntary physical activity, unless it is easy for humans to do, habitual and natural. If human beings do not have to move, they will not. If children start out their lives with sedentary habits and patterns, they will not have the capacity to move when they reach adulthood.